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About Job Boards

Digital job boards are Internet job sites that list employment opportunities. Though their use has evolved through advances in social media and job aggregation, job boards remain a vital aspect of online recruitment and a significant percentage of source of hire for most employers.

Of course, offline job boards, e.g., paper job postings on bulletin boards at universities, still exist and serve a purpose. But the simpler logistics, instant-update capabilities, search features and reach of online job boards make the more traditional job board seem as antiquated as a pirate's plank. Moreover, online postings are not as vulnerable to pirating by a job seeker hoping to hide it from others.

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One side of the job market, the employers, still find the quickest and the easiest way to fill a position is the use of job boards. However, because of the simplified logistics and familiarity with proven in-house staff, many employers prefer to begin a hiring search from within.

Failing this, they query internally within the company for recommendations and references, and if this still doesn't turn up a suitable candidate, they then turn to their wider network of business associates. It is only having exhausted these possibilities that an employer will then choose to spend time and/or money on trying to fill a vacancy through a job board. Statistically speaking, then, a specific job posted on the Web may be harder to fill because a given employer would not have paid to post it otherwise.

Prospective employees should carefully scrutinize such positions because they may require more training, education, and expertise or may be less desirable positions, which can be part of the reason they are being posted on the Internet at all.

Despite these limitations, people can and do find good jobs using the Internet, and job seekers are most likely to find such jobs if they make themselves known on sites where the jobs are. This has resulted in a plethora of supersites, such as Monster, CareerBuilder, and a host of others that help connect people with potential work through the force of the site size alone.

Their quality is not necessarily superior to smaller or more specialized sites, but their size, both in terms of employers and job seekers, ensures that with even a moderate success rate they connect a large number of people. But a job hunter ought not feel discouraged if a job isn't found with one of the supersites; rather, the effort should be made to try some of the smaller, and especially some of the more specialized search engines that will not only post available jobs, but also jobs with fewer registered competing job seekers.